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Thursday, January 14, 2016

SYRIAN KURDS SAY U.S. LIMITS STRIKES AGAINST ISIS

KURDISH COMMANDERS ARE DELIGHTED WITH RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IN SYRIA AS IT ALLOWS THEM TO FINALLY GAIN GROUND AGAINST ISIS AND TO TAKE AREAS THAT THE U.S. DENIED THEM BEFORE RUSSIA BECAME INVOLVED.

OVER A YEAR AGO, KURDISH FIGHTERS MADE IT KNOWN THAT U.S. AIRSTRIKES WERE NOT TARGETING THE ISLAMIC STATE AS THEY SHOULD.

HOWEVER, AS ALWAYS, WASHINGTON SEEMS TO BE ABANDONING THE KURDS, CHOOSING TO FUND OTHERS WHO ARE NOT AS EFFECTIVE AS THE KURDS AT STOPPING ISIS.

"Officials from the Kurds' semiautonomous region of northern Iraq told The Associated Press on Thursday that without help from the U.S. or its allies, the Kurds' fighting force, known as the peshmerga, will be hampered in their fight against IS.

Denise Natali, an expert on Iraq at the National Defense University, said the Kurds need to be applauded for fighting IS and caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees."

APPLAUSE NEVER WON A WAR, LADY.THE KURDS NEED REAL BACKING, NOT LIP SERVICE!

AMERICAN BOMBING WILL NOT WORK

"Almost two weeks after the Pentagon extended its aerial campaign from Iraq to neighbouring Syria in an attempt to take on Isis militants in their desert strongholds, Kurdish fighters said the bombing campaign was having little impact in driving them back.

“Air strikes alone are really not enough to defeat Isis in Kobani,” said Idris Nassan, a senior spokesman for the Kurdish fighters desperately trying to defend the important strategic redoubt from the advancing militants.

He said Isis had adapted its tactics to military strikes from the air. “Each time a jet approaches, they leave their open positions, they scatter and hide. What we really need is ground support. We need heavy weapons and ammunition in order to fend them off and defeat them.”

MANY IN THE PENTAGON AGREE, AS DO A FEW OUTSPOKEN SENATORS AND OFFICIALS FROM OTHER NATIONS!

“The strategy of aerial bombardment is not going to work to destroy Isil [Isis],” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham told CNN. “You cannot destroy Isil without a ground component.” He argued that training the inexperienced fighters of the Free Syrian Army in Saudi Arabia was “militarily unsound” and “will lead to their slaughter”.

His words were echoed in London by the former chief of the defence staff General Sir David Richards. “Air power alone will not win a campaign like this,” he told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show. “It isn’t actually a counter-terrorist operation. This is a conventional enemy in that it has armour, tanks, artillery … it is quite wealthy, it holds ground and it is going to fight. So therefore you have to view it as a conventional military campaign.”

WILL ISIS TAKE TURKEY NEXT?

More than 160,000 have fled to Turkey in the face of the Isis advance, sharply aggravating historic tensions between Turks and Kurds. On Sunday, a stray shell hit a village on the Turkish side of the border, injuring five people.Saleh Muslim, co-chair of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD), went to Ankara this weekend to hold meetings with Turkish security officials to discuss possible Turkish assistance in defending Kobani against Isis. Turkey’s government has vowed it will not sit idly by and let Kobani fall.“If Isis takes Kobani, they will be right on the border with Turkey. This concerns not only us, but Turkey, too.”

"Russia’s entry into the Syrian war and its subsequent conflict with Turkey have been a boon for one other combatant in addition to the Assad regime: the Syrian Kurds.That is the same Syrian Kurdish forces that—after Washington’s failure to bolster “moderate” Arab rebels—have also become America’s indispensable local partner in the campaign against Islamic State.That partnership with the U.S. remains vital for Syrian Kurdish forces. Yet, recent Russian operations have given them leeway to disregard American objections and gain new ground in controversial areas, including against other rebel groups. “America and Russia both support the Kurds. In a way, the Kurds may be the only power in Syria on which both superpowers agree,” said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Kurdish political analyst who focuses on Syria.The question now is to what extent the Syrian Kurds can pursue their rekindled romance with Moscow without endangering Washington’s backing—and without triggering a military intervention by their longtime nemesis, Turkey.Known as YPG, the main Syrian Kurdish force is an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a group that after the July collapse of its cease-fire with the Turkish government has pursued an armed struggle for a Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey. YPG units in Syria are full of PKK cadres and supporters originally from Turkey.While Washington is careful to maintain a distinction between the YPG (which it backs) and the PKK (which it considers a terrorist organization), Ankara doesn’t differentiate between the two groups. In Turkey’s view, both are equally dangerous—and possibly even more dangerous—than Islamic State.YPG fighters, however, have been remarkably successful in ousting Islamic State from key terrain in northeastern Syria over the past year.These victories contrast with the incapacity of Turkish-backed Sunni Arab groups to make much headway against the extremist organization—and with Turkey’s inability to control its own border with Islamic State-held parts of Syria.“Kurds on the ground have become valuable to the U.S. and the U.S. military to the extent that the U.S. military now sees the Kurds as more reliable than the Turks,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before this budding relationship with Washington, the leftist PKK and other Kurdish factions enjoyed decades of close ties with Moscow—a connection that waned with the end of the Cold War.The November downing of a Russian bomber jet by the Turkish air force in the vicinity of the Syrian-Turkish frontier plunged Moscow’s ties with Ankara into a crisis—and suddenly made the Kurds useful again, Russian analysts say. “Historically, Russia has had very good relations with the Kurds, but, until the incident with the Russian bomber, it was acting very carefully as far as Turkey was concerned,” said Yelena Suponina, a Middle East expert at Russia’s Institute of Strategic Studies, a state-run think tank. “Russia will act with greater boldness now, but it will remain careful. I don’t think it will go as far as supplying weapons, but there would likely be some coordination, some exchange of tactical information.”The degree of military coordination between the Syrian Kurds and Moscow would depend on the extent to which the two sides see eye to eye on how to shape Syria’s political future, added Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow. (Unlike other Syrian rebels, the Kurds have maintained de facto neutrality toward the Assad regime.)Already, Russian airstrikes against Turkish-backed Syrian rebel groups in the past month have enabled an advance by Kurdish forces in the western enclave of Afrin, a move that threatens to choke off the main supply route between Turkey and the rebel-held parts of Aleppo.The Kurds’ avowed aim is to link up Afrin with their areas in northeast Syria by seizing most of the land along the Syrian-Turkish border—something that Ankara has repeatedly said it would not permit.YPG officials have denied that they collaborate on the Afrin operations with Russia.“There is no coordination,” said Mr. Civiroglu, who is close to the Syrian Kurdish leadership. “However, what we have seen is that in the north of Aleppo the Russian airstrikes have helped YPG and the Kurds in general.”Meanwhile, Russia’s deployment of the S-400 antiaircraft system in Syria after the downing of its jet has kept Turkish planes out of Syrian airspace. This, in turn, has allowed YPG to ignore another Turkish “red line”—Ankara’s warning against the Kurds seizing territory from Islamic State on the western bank of the Euphrates.In recent weeks, YPG units and their Arab allies crossed the river at the Tishrin dam and established a foothold in an area that is outside the range of Turkish border artillery—and that, thanks to the Russians, is no longer vulnerable to the Turkish air force.

U.S. PLAYS BOTH ENDS...AGAINWhile the U.S. initially indicated that it accepted the Turkish “red line,” preferring Arab rebel forces to oust Islamic State from those areas west of the Euphrates, in December the U.S. military ended up carrying out intensive airstrikes that supported the Kurdish offensive there.

U.S. FAILURE...INTENTIONAL?“The U.S. is not doing well in the fight against ISIS, and it increasingly has to rely on the Kurds as its primary partner in Syria,” said Andrew Tabler, Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So now it seems that the Kurds can play Russia and America off against each other.”THAT'S A TRICK THE KURDS HAVE LEARNED FROM THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.

THE 'DAILY BEAST' SALUTES THE KURDS JUNE, 2014

“Those who confront death” is the literal translation of the word peshmerga Convoys of trucks carrying peshmerga, who flash thumbs-up signs when locals wave, have been scurrying along the highways of Iraqi Kurdistan strengthening positions in readiness to block jihadists and their Sunni militant allies from gaining any territory. But stopping jihadist infiltration will be no easy feat and the Kurds are relying on sympathizers among the Sunni tribes around Mosul and to the south of Kirkuk to alert them to ISIS movements.

The peshmerga are no newcomers to fighting Sunni militants. Prior to the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, Kurdish fighters helped American Special Forces evict the fanatical Ansar al-Islam group from a stronghold near the Iranian border. And in 2004, the peshmerga fought alongside US troops when Iraqi police and National Guard units in Mosul failed to contain a Sunni insurgency.

“If anyone comes and helps us to confront al Qaeda and ISIS we are ready, and that includes Iran, America, Israel, anyone.”
Until then the Kurds are focused on Kurdistan, or territory close to their lines and necessary for self-defense. And they are taking no chances. Today their leader, Masoud Barzani, issued a general call-up for retired Kurdish fighters to rejoin the peshmerga."

MAY THE LONG STRUGGLE FOR KURDISH AUTONOMY WIN OVER AMERICAN, TURKISH, AND IRAQI FAILURE TO HELP THEM.

IF THE KURDS BACKED OFF, IRAQ AND TURKEY WOULD SOON SEE ISIS FACE-TO-FACE IN EVERY TOWN.

"The fighting between ISIS and the Kurds stretches along a six-hundred-and-fifty-mile front in northeastern Iraq—a jagged line that roughly traces one border of Iraqi Kurdistan, the territory that the Kurds have been fighting for decades to establish as an independent state.

With as many as thirty million people spread across the Middle East, the Kurds claim to be the world’s largest ethnic group without a country. Iraqi Kurdistan, which contains about a quarter of that population, is a landlocked region surrounded almost entirely by neighbors—Turkey, Iran, and the government in Baghdad—that oppose its bid for statehood.

Since 2003, when the U.S. destroyed the Iraqi state and began spending billions of dollars trying to build a new one, the Kurds have been their most steadfast ally. When American forces departed, in 2011, not a single U.S. soldier had lost his life in Kurdish territory. As the rest of Iraq imploded, only the Kurdish region realized the dream that President George W. Bush had set forth when he ordered the attack: it is pro-Western, largely democratic, largely secular, and economically prosperous. President Obama recently told the Times that the Kurdish government is “functional the way we would like to see.”

Still, the Administration, bound to a policy it calls One Iraq, is quietly working to thwart the Kurds’ aspirations. American officials are warning companies that buying Kurdish oil may have dire legal consequences, and the warnings have been effective: the Kurdish regional government is nearly bankrupt.

Around Washington, the understanding is clear: if the long-sought country of Kurdistan becomes real, America’s twelve-year project of nation building in Iraq will be sundered. Kurdish leaders acknowledge that the emergence of ISIS and the implosion of Syria are changing the region in unpredictable ways. But the Kurds’ history with the state of Iraq is one of persistent enmity and bloodshed, and they see little benefit in joining up with their old antagonists. “Iraq exists only in the minds of people in the White House,” Masrour Barzani, the Kurdish intelligence chief and Masoud’s son, told me."

KNIFE IN THE BACK, RIGHT?

AMERICA PUT THE KURDS BETWEEN IRAN AND IRAQ BACK WHEN REAGAN AND THEN, FOR A FEW YEARS, BUSH #1 WAS HAVING THAT LOVE AFFAIR WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN IN ORDER TO KEEP IRAN FROM GAINING A FOOTHOLD IN IRAQ.

THEY'VE BEEN SOLD OUT AND ABANDONED MORE TIMES THAN ANYONE CAN COUNT, BUT THEY STILL GO AGAINST IMPOSSIBLE ODDS.